Earlier this year, British author Helen Pluckrose, also the Editor-in-Chief of Areo Magazine, co-authored a new book, Cynical Threories, with James Lindsay, who is the creator of the anti-woke website New Discourses. The long title to their book is also their compact thesis: Cynical Theories: How Activist 
Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.
Pluckrose was recently interviewed by Jason Hill of Quillette. The topic was the brand of postmodernism embraced by modern Critical Social Justice activists. In recent years CSJ’s version of postmodernism has been increasingly employed as a political strategy by the Woke Left. What is “postmodernism”? Pluckrose offers these four characteristics:
- Objective knowledge is inaccessible and what we consider knowledge is actually just a cultural construct that operates in the service of power.
- Dominant groups in society—wealthy, white, heterosexual, western men—get to decide what is and isn’t legitimate knowledge and this becomes dominant discourses which are then accepted by the general population who perpetuate oppressive power dynamics like white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.
- The critical theorists exist to deconstruct these discourses and make their oppressive nature visible. This results in the breakdown of boundaries and categories through which we understand things like emotion and reason, fact and fiction, male and female.
- [Critical theorists] also produce a profound cultural relativism and a neurotic focus on language and language policing as well as a rejection of individuality and humanism in favor of identity politics. This is a problem because of the resulting threats to freedom of belief and speech, the divisive tribalism and the rejection of science, reason and liberalism.
Hill asked Pluckrose why it was necessary for Lindsay and Pluckrose to write Cynical Theories at this time? Pluckrose offered this response:
Critical Social Justice’s [CSJ’s] influence has increasingly been being felt much more broadly than just in the universities. Books like Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist and DiAngelo’s White Fragility are best sellers. People are being no-platformed, fired, and cancelled for disagreeing with these ideas. Here in the UK, the police have investigated somebody posting a limerick on Twitter that did not adhere to trans activism’s concept of gender identity and a journalist publishing an interview with a historian who said slavery was not genocide. Gender critical feminists are routinely threatened and intimidated for making arguments that self-ID is a threat to women’s sex-based rights. Since the brutal death of George Floyd and the BLM protests, my colleagues and I have been inundated by requests for assistance from individuals whose employer, university or children’s school is trying to impose mandatory “antiracist” training of a thoroughly illiberal kind rooted in critical race theory ideas about invisible systems of whiteness underlain by bad science about “implicit bias.” We have had to set up a Discord server to try to triage this and help people convince their employers to allow them to reject racism from their own philosophical, ethical or religious beliefs and not this highly theoretical and political one. It is important to note that people of all races object to this kind of “antiracist” training and that black people are politically and intellectually diverse. Similarly, many women reject intersectional concepts of feminism, few LGBT people have even read queer theory, the majority of trans people just want to be left alone to live as feels authentic and most obese and disabled people have no wish to take this aspect of themselves on as a political identity . . . [The greatest threat of CSJ] Its greatest threat is to science and rigorous empirical research and its problematization of all historical figures and drive to “decolonize” knowledge.
Hill also asked whether reason, logic, rational discourse, and a commitment to universal liberal values would eventually prevail over CSJ? Pluckrose answered: “I hope so, yes.” She raised the concern that a pushback against CSJ could take the form of a “populist, anti-intellectual, anti-equality movement from the Right” that is as illiberal as CSJ.
Pluckrose mentioned two organizations that have positioned themselves as defenders of enlightenment values in opposition to CSJ activism: FIRE and Heterodox Academy. I support both of these organizations and recommend them to readers. Consider the mission statements of these organizations:
Fire (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education)
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience — the essential qualities of liberty.
Heterodox Academy is a group of 4,400+ professors, administrators, K-12 educators, staff & students who believe diverse viewpoints & open inquiry are critical to research & learning.
The above excerpts from Quillette’s interview of Helen Pluckrose are parts of the full article, which I highly recommend for anyone struggling with the motives, terminology, tactics and long-term plan of post-modernist theory and activism. I am one of those people struggling, and I appreciated this even-handed and carefully written article on CSJ activism.
If you are interested in the above article at Quillette, you might also be interested in other work by Helen Pluckrose, including a series of hoax papers she wrote with James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian in order to expose the low quality of Woke academic journals as “defined by groupthink, confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, which allow bogus work to regularly be published in these (sub)fields.” A good entry point to this fascinating (and entertaining) endeavor can be found in this article at the Heterodox’ Blog: “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.“
